If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist … - Alan Watts

Certainly I cannot command the sun to be egg-shaped, nor force your brain to think differently. I cannot see the inside of the sun, nor can I share your private feelings. Yet neither can I change the shape or structure of my own brain, nor have a sensation of it as a contraption like a cauliflower. But if my brain is nonetheless I, the sun is I, the air is I, and society, of which you are a member, is also I — for all these things are just as essential to my existence as my brain.

because even then I was ill at ease with the commitment to spiritual imperialism which most Christians feel to be the sine qua non of being Christian, as if one could not be a true Christian without being a militant missionary.

All this will involve a curious reversal of the Protestant ethic, which, at least in the United States, is one of the big obstacles to a future of wealth and leisure for all. The Devil, it is said, finds work for idle hands to do, and human energy cannot be trusted unless most of it is absorbed in hard, productive work — so that, on coming home, we are too tired to get into mischief. It is feared that affluence plus leisure will, as in times past, lead to routs and orgies and all the perversities that flow therefrom, and then on to satiation, debilitation, and decay — as in Hogarth's depiction of A Rake's Progress.